2 Cor 5:20. “Therefore we carry out an embassy for Christ.”
He explains the use of the ministry committed to the apostles by these and the following words. “We diligently perform our office,” he says, “acting as ambassadors for Christ,” that is, in the place and stead of Christ, and, as it were, speaking in the person of Christ, whose apostles we are. When he mentions an embassy (legatio), he indicates to us the sovereignty of Christ. For it belongs to great princes to send ambassadors—such as are signified by the Greek word πρεσβεύομεν (presbeuomen, “we act as ambassadors”). Hence, says Faber, “we may be called orators and ambassadors.” Thus at the same time Paul magnifies both himself and the dignity of the apostolic ministry.
“As though God were exhorting through us.”
Instead of exhorting, some prefer beseeching, others comforting. For the Greek παρακαλοῦντος (parakalountos) signifies all these. But the meaning of comforting does not fit this place. The sense is rather this: when we, in carrying out our embassy, exhort or beseech men to be reconciled to God through faith and repentance, they ought to receive it as if God Himself were exhorting or beseeching. For He acts through us as through His ministers, just as formerly He acted through Christ while He dwelt on earth. But after Christ was taken up into heaven, we now carry out His office on earth in His stead.
God therefore is the first and principal author; Christ is the principal minister; we are secondary and vicarious ministers, sent by God and Christ. The discourse here is about Christ as man.
Some connect this part with what follows, not without reason, so that beseeching is more suitably signified by the Greek term.
“We beseech for Christ.”
That is, we beg men in Christ’s place, as though God were beseeching through us. He does not say we command or we admonish, but δεόμεθα (deometha, “we beg, we entreat, we pray”). Indeed, he even makes God Himself to be beseeching—not simply, but through His ministers—so that by this he may show that a preacher of the Gospel ought not only to act by commanding, reproving, and admonishing, but also by begging and beseeching, in order that men may come to Christ.
Hence he writes to Timothy (2 Tim 4): “Reprove, rebuke, beseech in all patience and doctrine.” And Paul himself performed this abundantly in his Epistles, as in Romans 12: “I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God,” and Ephesians 4: “I therefore, a prisoner in the Lord, beseech you.”
What, then, they beg and beseech of men as ambassadors of Christ, he adds:
“Be reconciled to God.”
The Greek has the imperative καταλλάγητε (katallagēte, “be reconciled”), yet in a form suited to beseeching. Therefore, “we beseech for Christ,” he says, saying to men, “Be reconciled to God.” As if he were to say: this is what we ask of men in the person of Christ; this is what God Himself begs through us—that they may return into grace with Him.
Marvelous is the goodness of God: He Himself is the one whom men have offended by sin, and yet He sends ambassadors with prayers to them for reconciliation. No less astonishing is the wickedness of the human mind, which must be invited by prayers and gentle entreaties to those things which pertain to its own salvation.
Now how the apostles still invite the world to reconciliation with God, when (as was said before) He reconciled the world to Himself in Christ, can be understood from what precedes. For He reconciled the world to Himself in Christ insofar as, in Christ’s Passion, He gave an effective cause for reconciling to Himself all those whom He chose from the human race for salvation. Nevertheless, for reconciliation to have its effect in individuals, it is necessary that that cause be applied to them through faith, repentance, the invocation of the divine name, and the very sacraments divinely ordained for carrying out reconciliation—all of which flow from the same source, namely, the merits of Christ’s Passion.
With Cajetan, it is to be noted that what the Apostle says, “As though God were exhorting through us; we beseech for Christ,” is written significantly in the form which logicians call actum signatum (the signified act), not actum exercitum (the act actually exercised). For Paul is not here actually beseeching, but teaching that it is the office of Christ’s ambassadors to strive, even by beseeching, to bring all men to Christ. The proof is that he does not say, “God exhorting you, we beseech you,” as if these words were directed specifically to the Corinthians, but absolutely and without any added pronoun—namely, to signify in general the office of ministers of the New Law toward all to whom they are sent.
The words “Be reconciled to God” are mimetic according to the exposition we have given. And Cajetan judges that what follows should also be taken materially.
2 Cor 5:21. “Him who knew no sin, He made sin for us.”
Namely, God. For since in some manuscripts in Augustine’s time it was read, “He who knew no sin made Himself sin for us,” as though Christ Himself had sinned for us, Augustine rightly reproves that reading as corrupt (Enchiridion, ch. 41; Contra Maximum, book 2, ch. 2).
In the Greek, a causal conjunction connects this with what precedes: τοῦ γὰρ μὴ γνόντα ἁμαρτίαν (tou gar mē gnonta hamartian, “for Him who did not know sin”). A reason is given for hoping for and seeking reconciliation with God. That reason is the great kindness and mercy of God, by which He made His Son, who knew no sin, to be sin for us. And perhaps through similarity of characters, the word gar (“for”) later dropped out.
Christ is said not to have known sin according to Scriptural idiom, because He committed no sin—that is, He was so alien from sin as if He had been altogether ignorant of it. Nor is this strange, since He who was man and at the same time God could not sin. Thus it is said in Psalm 34: “They asked me things I did not know.”
But what follows, “He made Him sin for us,” can be understood in three ways, as Lombard and St. Thomas carefully note.
First sense:
He made Him a victim or sacrifice for our sins. For in the old usage, sacrifices for sins were themselves called sins. Hence Hosea 4 says of the priests: “They shall eat the sins of my people,” that is, the offerings for sins. In this way, after Ambrosiaster, Pelagius, Primasius, Sedulius, and Haimo explain the passage, adducing Leviticus 4 according to the Septuagint, where it is said: “He shall lay his hand upon the head of the sin,” that is, of the victim for sin. In the Hebrew, Jerome renders: “upon the head of the victim which is for sin.” Likewise Leviticus 10: “Why have you not eaten the sin?” where the Septuagint has “that which is for sin,” and Jerome, “the victim for sin.” Similar expressions occur in Numbers 6, as Augustine notes (Questions on Numbers, q. 12). This sense pleases many, and especially Augustine, who frequently teaches it.
Second sense:
He made Him sin, that is, a man subject to death, miseries, and sufferings, and thus like sinners—so that by sin is understood either the likeness of sin or the punishment of sin. Augustine also mentions this sense in the places already noted, as do Oecumenius and Paul of Burgos.
Third sense:
He made Him to be regarded as a sinner by men, as it is written in Isaiah 53: “He was numbered with the transgressors.” So this is said according to a manner of speaking whereby something is said to be such, not because it truly is, but because men suppose it to be such. Thus Bathsheba said to David (1 Kings 1): “I and my son Solomon shall be sinners,” that is, we shall be regarded as guilty and our lives will be in danger.
But since, according to this exposition, God might seem to be the author of a false reputation—that is, of human error in judging wrongly—I judge that this third sense must either be corrected or explained according to the commentary of the Greeks, Chrysostom and others, who interpret sin emphatically as a great sinner. As if the Apostle were to say: for our sake, He treated Him as though He were sin itself, crime itself—that is, as a man extraordinarily wicked—so that He laid upon Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53), in the manner of the scapegoat, which bore all the iniquities of the sons of Israel that the high priest had confessed over its head (Leviticus 16).
Thus God made Christ sin when He delivered Him to the death of the cross, a kind of punishment ordinarily inflicted on notorious robbers, such as Barabbas, and such as the two criminals crucified with the Lord (Luke 23). So elsewhere Christ is said to have been made a curse for us, because it is written: “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” (Galatians 3; Deuteronomy 21). Chrysostom and others also bring that Scripture here.
From this then follows what the third exposition implied: that Christ was regarded as a great sinner—namely, by those who are accustomed to judge sins from punishments.
In this sense, more than in the two former, there shines forth the antithesis between sin and justice intended by the Apostle, which he completes with the following words, at the same time explaining the phrase for us:
“That we might become the justice of God in Him.”
In Him is a Hebraism, that is, through Him, as the Ambrosian text has it and Oecumenius explains: through Christ, that is, through the merit of Christ.
But how, through Christ, we become the justice of God must be carefully considered. For sectarians abuse this passage in order to teach that all our justice, by which we are called just, is external—namely, the very justice of God or of Christ—which becomes ours when God gratuitously imputes it to us, in the same way, they say, that Christ was made sin or a sinner—not by injustice inherent in Him, but by the imputation of our sins, which He bore in His body upon the tree (1 Peter 2), God, according to the prophet, laying upon Him the iniquity of us al.
But this kind of interpretation is altogether foreign to the mind of the holy Fathers and of orthodox interpreters. For Augustine everywhere explains the justice of God attributed to us as that which is in us, not from us but from God—that is, which we have from God as something internal and inherent by the grace of God. The places are: De Spiritu et Littera, ch. 9 and 18; Tractate 26 on John; Sermon 15 on the words of the Apostle, ch. 1; in the Enarration on Psalm 98 at the verse, “Judgment and justice in Jacob you have done”; and book 3 Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, ch. 7. In these places he expressly explains how the same justice is called both the justice of God and ours: God’s, because it is from God; ours, because it is in us. God’s justice, because God gives it; ours, because we receive it in ourselves.
The same sense he develops more fully in the epistle or book On the Grace of the New Testament to Honoratus, ch. 30, where among other things he makes the matter clear from a similar Scripture. “Just as,” he says, “what is read in Psalm 3, ‘Salvation is the Lord’s,’ does not mean that salvation by which the Lord Himself is saved, but that by which those are saved whom He Himself makes saved; so when ‘the justice of God’ is read,” citing Romans 10, “‘ignorant of the justice of God,’ it is not to be understood as that by which God is just, but that by which men are just whom He justifies by His grace.” Thus he.
Nor do the Greek and Latin commentators differ much from this. Some interpret the justice of God as that which is justice before God—that is, true justice—so that before God is a notation of genuine justice. We have shown in our exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (Rom 1:17; Rom 3:21; Rom 10:1–3) that this sense of the Pauline expression is very probable. Yet this sense does not differ from the former. For that alone is true justice before God which God Himself works in us, since nothing can please Him except what is His own.
Accordingly, when the Apostle says that Christ was made sin for us, so that we might be made truly just through Him, he means that justice which is approved by God—so that from this it is most clearly refuted that fiction of imputative justice.
Nor, because Christ was a sinner by reputation only, does it follow that we also are made just by reputation only. For neither was it fitting nor could it happen that Christ should receive true injustice in Himself; and if He had received it, He would by no means have been fit to satisfy God for our sins. For injustice is contrary to satisfaction, and Christ would again have needed satisfaction.
Christ therefore was made sin for us in this sense: He was reckoned among the unjust and suffered for us, as is said of Him on the cross, since He truly bore the punishment due to our sins—not truly our sins, but truly their penalty. For “surely He bore our infirmities and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53). And He also merited for us true justice, by which we might truly and properly be just according to internal rectitude of soul.
Yet the Apostle did not say, “that we might be made just before God,” but “the justice of God,” either on account of the antithetical expression between sin and justice, or, according to Chrysostom and Theophylact, in order to show the excellence of grace—namely, that a man is so perfectly justified that no blemish and no stain of sin is now found in him. This exposition corresponds to the understanding of sin in the former member. But that perfection of justice which excludes every stain of sin does not belong to this age, but to the future.
If anyone should contend that in both members reputation is signified, we do not strongly oppose, provided that he remembers this distinction: that in the former part, the reputation is that of men, who very often are deceived, reputing that which is not; but in the latter, the reputation is that of God, who cannot be deceived, and whose judgment is always according to truth. Thus, Christ was truly reputed a sinner before men, who are deceived; but we are reputed just before God, who is not deceived. From this divine reputation, by which God judges us just, it again follows what I have said: that we are truly just and not merely imputatively just, as we have more fully explained in Tome I, page 159 and following, on that passage of Romans 4: “Abraham believed God, and it was reputed to him unto justice.”
2 Cor 6:1. “Lest you receive the grace of God in vain.”
These words also pertain to explaining the office of Christ’s ambassadors, just like those of the preceding chapter: “We beseech for Christ: Be reconciled to God.” For the Apostle is still pursuing the same argument.
“Helping” — in Greek συνεργοῦντες (synergountes, “cooperating”), as Augustine reads in book 1 On the Baptism of Infants, ch. 27. The Greek reads literally: “But cooperating, we also exhort.” Augustine has “and we also beseech,” Sedulius “and we beseech,” others “and we entreat.”
“Not to have received the grace of God in vain,” that is, “lest you receive the grace of God in vain.” Many Latin manuscript codices also have the conjunction and, as do the ancient concordances. Ambrose also reads it thus: “And helping, we beseech.” Erasmus followed this reading as well.
Now, the word helping or cooperating is referred by some to men — that is, to the Corinthians — as the ancient Latins, and Chrysostom is more inclined to this opinion. Others refer it to both men and God, as Theophylact, and among the Latins Lombard, Hervaeus, Aquinas, and the Carthusian. Others, which seems more pleasing, refer it to God alone, as Oecumenius, Lyra, and Cajetan. For in a very similar manner he said in the former Epistle, ch. 3: “We are God’s helpers” or “co-workers.”
Therefore the sense of the Apostle is this: since God in Christ reconciled the world to Himself by offering a sufficient cause of reconciliation and justification in the merit of Christ’s Passion, we apostles, to whom God has given the ministry of announcing and carrying out reconciliation, cooperating with God as His ministers, exhort you with entreaty that you do not receive in vain and without fruit so great a benefit of God, which through us has been not only preached to you Corinthians but also conferred upon you — since you have received it — that is, that you do not render it useless to yourselves.
Which indeed will be the case if you do not persevere in the faith you have received, or if you suppose that faith without good works suffices for you. Thus, almost all the ancients explain this exhortation about the grace of God received, that it not be received in vain. Hence it is clear that grace here is not to be understood as habitual or actual grace inhering in the soul, as Cajetan also rightly notes, but rather that general benefit of the reconciliation of the world, of which the Apostle had spoken before, and of which he writes to Titus 2: “The grace of God our Savior has appeared to all men,” etc.
Yet this benefit, before it is applied, is understood more in God than in men, so that this grace is the benevolent will of God by which He gave His Son to us as a propitiator — as we expound that passage of the Epistle to Titus. Although inhering grace is also rightly said to be received in vain when one does not persevere in it but casts it away by sinning.
2 Cor 6:2. “For He says …”
Supply: Scripture, or rather God. For what immediately precedes is: “And helping, we exhort,” and indeed the words that are cited are the words of God speaking. To whom He speaks we shall soon see.
“In an accepted time I have heard you, and in the day of salvation I have helped you.”
This testimony is found in Isaiah 49, corresponding word for word both to the version of the Septuagint interpreters (whose very words are placed here) and to the Hebrew truth. In the prophet, these are the words of God the Father to Christ, by which He testifies that He has heard Him praying for the salvation of the elect — of those who were to be gathered from the Gentiles — and that He helped Him for the same cause while He labored, as is said in Isaiah 53, that “He labored in soul,” and was aided — and this in the accepted time, that is, in a time acceptable to all, and in which He determined to call the Gentiles to salvation.
Paul, however, according to the exposition of many, applies this passage to God promising hearing and help to men, if they do not neglect the opportunity of the time granted to them by Him, in which salvation is prepared for them, and if they do not receive the grace of God in vain. But there is no necessity to change the prophetic sense. For the Apostle can also be explained in this way:
That is, God the Father says to the incarnate Son: “In the accepted time I have heard you,” etc., as now expounded. And why he introduces this speech of the Father to the Son from the prophet, he declares by the words that follow:
“Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
Behold, says the Apostle, that acceptable and saving time of which God the Father spoke in the prophet’s words cited to the Son is now; it has now arrived; it has now been announced to you. And therefore we exhort you that you do not allow yourselves to receive this grace in vain.
Moreover, it sufficiently appears that accepted and acceptable are not to be referred to God, as some wish, but to men, and are to be explained by the day of salvation. For that time is called acceptable to men — that is, worthy to be received with applause and exultation by all, inasmuch as it brings salvation to the world. This is expressed more explicitly by the word acceptable, just as Christ Himself is called “the expectation of the nations” (Genesis 49) and “the desired of all nations” (Haggai 2), not because the nations had expected or desired Him — for He had not been previously promised or announced to the Gentiles — but because He was to be the Savior of the nations, and therefore was rightly to be awaited by them with great desire.
It is also to be noted that for accepted and acceptable, Paul uses two different Greek words: δεκτός (dektos, “acceptable”) and εὐπρόσδεκτος (euprosdektos, “most acceptable, highly welcome”), of which the latter intensifies the meaning of the former. As if the Apostle were to say: “Behold, now is a time not merely acceptable, but most acceptable.” And as he speaks elsewhere of the same mystery of salvation, calling it “worthy of all acceptance” (1 Timothy 1).
Augustine transcribed the present passage from the words “Behold, now is the acceptable time” up to verse 12 in book 4 of On Christian Doctrine, ch. 10, in order by this example to teach that the Apostle did not lack the ability to speak with great grandeur and ornament, which Cicero requires in an orator. Indeed, the matter itself proclaims that this whole discourse — whether you consider the style, the mode of speaking, or the diction — is adorned and beautifully suited to the subject proposed.
CONTINUE
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